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Building better financial habits isn't a knowledge problem. Most people who carry too much credit card debt know it's a problem. Most people who don't save enough know they should be saving more. The information isn't missing. Something else is. What's actually in the way is the pull of existing behavior, and existing behavior is stubborn not because people are weak, but because the brain is efficient. It automates what it repeats, and automation runs quietly in the backgroun

A common reason people give for not working with a financial advisor is that they don't think they need one yet. Things are stable. The bills are getting paid. There's some money going into a retirement account. Nothing is on fire. The advisor can wait. What tends to follow is one of two things. Either things stay stable and the wait continues indefinitely, or something disrupts the stability and now there's a problem to solve under pressure. Neither outcome is a good argumen

June is Pride Month, and Sexton Finance is proud to stand with and serve the LGBTQ+ community. That statement isn't a formality. Financial planning is personal work. It touches identity, family structure, legal standing, and long-term security in ways that look different for different people, and the LGBTQ+ community has historically navigated financial planning in a landscape that wasn't always designed with them in mind. Estate planning, beneficiary designations, insurance

Most people have heard of the sunk cost fallacy, at least in passing. The basic idea isn't complicated, money already spent is gone, and the fact that you spent it shouldn't influence what you decide next. Past costs are irrelevant to future decisions. Knowing that and acting on it are two different things. What the Sunk Cost Fallacy Actually Looks Like In a classroom, it's clean and easy to illustrate. You bought a concert ticket for $80. The night of the show, you feel terr

Earlier this year I published my first memoir, Bleeding for Ghosts, which tells the story of my journey through financial crisis, the identity that formed in survival mode, and the moment I finally had the words to describe what had happened to me. Today I'm excited to announce the follow-up. Ever since the launch of Bleeding for Ghosts, I've been working on something, and now it's finally here! When the Ghosts Still Whisper is officially live on Amazon and I could not be mor

Financial comparison is nearly universal. Almost everyone, at some point, has looked at someone else's income, lifestyle, home, car, or apparent financial ease and felt something uncomfortable stir. That feeling tends to produce one of two responses, a motivating pressure to do more, or a quiet erosion of satisfaction with what already exists. More often than people realize, it produces both at once. The research on social comparison and financial behavior is consistent on on

There are milestones in a professional's career that feel administrative, a box checked, a credential added to a list, and there are milestones that actually change what you can do for the people you serve. My Illinois Life Producer license allows me to expand my service offering. The license is official. I'm now authorized to write life insurance policies in the state of Illinois, and I'm ready to have that conversation with clients from start to finish. Why This Matters Bey

The debt-to-income ratio, often called DTI, is a common, but often misunderstood number in personal finance. Lenders look at it every time you apply for a mortgage, a car loan, or a significant line of credit, and it often determines not just whether you qualify, but what interest rate you pay. Understanding what it is, how it's calculated, and what the numbers actually mean gives you the ability to work on it deliberately rather than discover where you stand only when it mat

Every year, Memorial Day arrives on the calendar like any other Monday, with the small familiar rituals of a long weekend, the cookouts and the traffic and the first real warmth of early summer. And every year, underneath all of that, is something quieter and heavier that deserves more than a passing acknowledgment. Today is not primarily a day off. It is a day of remembrance, set aside specifically to honor the men and women who gave their lives in military service to this c

Financial decisions carry a weight that doesn't show up in any ledger. Choosing between competing priorities, evaluating trade-offs under uncertainty, holding a plan together while life applies pressure from every direction, these are not mechanical tasks. They are cognitively and emotionally demanding ones, and the fatigue they produce is real, cumulative, and widely underestimated. The clinical term is decision fatigue, and it describes the well-documented decline in decisi

Most conversations about changing financial behavior start in the wrong place. They start with the habit, the overspending, the avoidance, the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle that keeps repeating despite real effort to break it. The assumption built into that approach is that if someone just understood the habit well enough, or wanted to change it badly enough, the behavior would shift. What that assumption misses is the part that actually holds the habit in place. People don't pr

There is a version of overspending that gets talked about most often, the impulse buy, the retail therapy cliché, the person who treats themselves after a hard week and calls it self-care. That version is easy to identify and easy to dismiss. The more interesting version, and the one that does far more financial damage, is the spending that happens under genuine financial stress and feels completely justified while it's happening. This is not a character flaw. It is a documen

There is a version of financial struggle that almost no one talks about openly, and it lives in households with good incomes. It shows up in people who earn more than their parents ever did, who have job security and a full refrigerator and a car that starts, and who still lie awake on a Tuesday night doing the math in their heads. It doesn't fit the narrative we have about financial hardship, so it mostly goes unnamed. But it's real, it's widespread, and it has a fairly stra

This week I passed both parts of the Illinois life insurance producer exam. The application is now pending review with the Illinois Director of Insurance, and once it's approved, Sexton Finance will add life insurance planning and income protection to the coordinated practice I already offer. The reason for the expansion is rooted in something I've watched up close for years. Most families I talk with already have the products. What they lack is someone helping them connect t

Most financial planning conversations start with numbers. Income, expenses, debt balances, savings rates, net worth. These are the measurable dimensions of a financial life, and they matter. But in my experience working with clients, the numbers rarely tell the whole story, and they almost never explain why a person makes the financial decisions they do when the math points clearly in another direction. For that explanation, you usually have to go further back. The beliefs pe

There is a persistent and well-intentioned belief in the personal finance world that the primary reason people make poor financial decisions is that they don't know enough. Give people the right information, the thinking goes, and better decisions will follow. It's a reasonable hypothesis, and it has driven decades of financial literacy initiatives in schools, workplaces, and communities across the country. The problem is that the evidence doesn't support it. Researchers have

If information were enough to change financial behavior, financial literacy education would have solved the personal finance crisis decades ago. The research, the statistics, and the warnings are widely available, and people with full access to all of it still overdraft the same account every month, carry high-interest balances they know are growing, and abandon budgets they genuinely wanted to follow. The problem isn't that people don't know better. The problem is that knowi

There is a particular kind of frustration that financial advisors and planners recognize immediately, the kind that comes from watching a client do everything right and then quietly undo it. The debt gets paid down, the savings account finally has a real balance, the income increases, and then, within weeks or months, something shifts. The card gets loaded back up. The emergency fund gets raided for something that wasn't quite an emergency. The budget that held for six months

Most conversations about overspending start in the wrong place. They start with discipline, with budgets, with the suggestion that the person simply needs to try harder or want it more. That framing misses something important, and it misses it consistently. Emotional spending is not primarily a discipline problem. It is a regulation problem, and understanding that distinction matters a great deal when you're trying to actually fix it. What Emotional Spending Actually Is Behav

There's a moment I've witnessed more times than I can count, sitting across from clients in the early stages of getting their finances in order. It's not a dramatic moment. There's no number that suddenly looks impressive, no debt that disappears overnight, no account balance that signals arrival. It's quieter than that. It's the moment someone decides to do something different this month than they did last month. That's it. That's the moment. And most people, including the p